‘The first deal got my husband killed.’
‘Exactly. Seems logical, right? I mean, right?’
‘Tell me about the night you murdered my husband.’
‘No, not me. I didn’t, I didn’t set it up. I was just, like, there.’
‘Who set it up?’
‘Burke. The party was a trap. But nobody ever said anything about, oh God, I mean, murder? I didn’t agree to that. Sure, I knew they were going to beat him up, they even said they wanted to plant some coke on him and call the police, get him deported.’
‘Where did they murder him? Tell me how it happened.’
‘They told me they didn’t kill him, he must have crawled into the lake on his own, I didn’t see it, I didn’t see anything, I don’t know anything, I just, I just, I just –’
I pointed the gun at his face. He threw his arms over his head and curled into a ball, as though that was going to do him any good against a bullet.
‘I didn’t see it! I didn’t want any part of it but Burke bragged he wasn’t just a movie star, he did his own stunts, and it was just insane, the photographer was already bleeding when we got next door because of what Earl had done to him but that wasn’t enough. He tied him up and he, it was just sickening, I mean, the guy already told them what they wanted to know, what was the point? But still he didn’t stop, he just kept hitting him, wanted me to help drag him back to the house but I just, ran, I got in my car and took off.’
‘Back to what house?’
‘Burke’s! Back to Burke’s house.’
I left him barefoot on the top of the mountain, didn’t have enough decency to leave him his shoes for the walk down. Maybe he’d hedged about his role in things but he’d told me the basic truth. His confession should have gratified me. I’d learned most of what I needed to know to take revenge in clear conscience. But I didn’t feel clear, I didn’t feel clean and I didn’t feel like I had much conscience.
37
The security cameras at the top corners of Burke’s gilded gates may not have been manned twenty-four hours a day but if the house was as wired for video as Finley claimed I didn’t mistake them for decoys. Signs warning of electronic security measures and private armed response decorate half the houses in LA. Many are a bluff, nothing more than a stake in the ground or a decal glued to a window. I didn’t think Burke’s system was a bluff. An obsidian buzzer rested in a brass plate on the gate post. I pressed it, stepped back and took a flash picture of the camera lens. I wanted Earl to know I watched them as closely as they watched me.
He made his appearance about ten minutes after I’d rung the bell, strut-waddling down the granite drive in the heavy-footed style typical of over-pumped body builders. I noted with some pride the bandages at his elbows, gained from his slide down the hill the day before. He grinned and puffed out his chest as he neared the end of the drive. Through the bars of the gate gleamed the white block letters printed on his T-shirt, SHUT UP BITCH.
‘I know it’s late,’ I said. ‘Did I catch you in the middle of a wank?’
‘What’s a wank?’
‘It’s what you used to do before you took so many steroids your pecker fell off.’
His grin flattened. ‘If you’re trying to trick me into beating the shit out of you, you’re very close to succeeding.’
‘You’re good at beating the shit out of people, aren’t you?’
‘I’ve had some practice.’
‘You know the King’s Road Café on Beverly?’
‘Not my kind of place,’ he sniffed.
‘I’ll meet you there in thirty minutes. We’ll talk about the photographs.’
The King’s Road Café and neighbouring newsstand were prime sources of show-biz information. The pre-war neighbourhood apartment buildings and duplexes bordered the talent agencies of Beverly Hills, attracting a core of young actors and actresses who aspired to but couldn’t yet afford the 90210 zip code. Both newsstand and café were good spots to catch candids of young celebutants thumbing the film and gossip magazines. Tables lined the sidewalk to allow customers to soak up automobile exhaust with the fresh California sunshine. The tables stayed out at night to accommodate tourists and the half-dozen or so tobacco smokers left on the Westside. The vast majority of non-smokers sat inside, watching the puffers out the plate glass windows like animals in a zoo.
Earl looked like he belonged inside less than the smokers. The clientele of the Kings Road Café favoured the flat biceps, distressed blue jeans and can’t-remember-my-last-haircut look of the professional arts set. Earl carried far too obvious a load of testosterone in his razor-cut head and baby-bull shoulders to blend anywhere except a gym. He had the sense to drape a black leather jacket over his SHUT UP BITCH T-shirt.
I’d chosen a table with clear sight lines to the front and back doors and sat with my back to the wall. In my right jacket pocket I fingered the canister of pepper spray. I kicked out the chair opposite mine when he came up to the table. He turned it around and sat with pneumatic forearms curled around the tines of the backrest. I’d grown up with that style of sitting. My dad sat that way all the time.
‘Sorry about your husband,’ he said, not sorry at all.
‘It was a green card marriage, strictly business.’ I focused on a spot six inches behind his head when I spoke, my eyes flat of anger and mercy. He didn’t mean anything to me, the look said, he was just there. It was the kind of look I gave any predator to convince it I’m not just meat, I have teeth and claws of my own. ‘I needed the money. Still do.’
‘The real-estate agent told me what you wanted.’ The barbed way he said that gave me the idea Peter St John had a rough time after I’d left. ‘He seemed to think you didn’t know your husband was blackmailing us.’
‘Like I said, we weren’t particularly close. You mind telling me the asking price?’
The lie creased his eyes before it passed his lips. ‘A hundred grand.’
‘That’s a lot of money.’
‘Woulda been if he’d lived.’
‘If I were to find a set of prints, offer them to you instead of the tabloids, would the price still stand?’
‘You don’t know shit, do you? A hundred for the negatives. Prints would be worth far less, maybe twenty.’
‘I thought you had the negatives.’
The waitress popped into the conversation with a friendly, ‘How we doing tonight?’ She poised the tip of her pen on the order pad and smiled like we were all good friends. I said everything was fine, thanks, and ordered a plain coffee. Earl asked for herbal tea. When she took the order to the kitchen I said, ‘Of course you have the negs. You set the guy up, waited for him to show, then took the keys and tossed the apartment, right?’
‘We didn’t set the trap. The voice on the phone did.’
‘What voice?’
Earl amused himself by bending his spoon into a circle. ‘The Brit didn’t call. Some other guy did. Said he could broker a deal for the negatives. Some days later he called again. Turned out he couldn’t talk him out of publication, at least, that’s what he told us. Said he felt real bad about it. If we wanted to throw another party, he’d make sure somebody showed up with a camera. We set it up and he was right, the Brit didn’t have a clue he’d been back-stabbed.’
‘So you beat him up and tossed his apartment.’
‘You have a genuine talent for being half-right. The apartment was already trashed when I got there.’
‘And the voice?’
‘Never heard from him again.’
If I believed what Earl said then somebody else searched Gabe’s apartment first. The voice on the phone knew the apartment would be empty. But if the voice had searched the apartment and found the negatives he would have followed through with the sale. Either the negatives weren’t in the apartment or they were later taken from him. The problem with that logic was that I didn’t particularly trust what Earl told me. ‘According to you, the negatives are still out there somewhere.’
He gripped his fork and without taking his eyes off me twisted the metal into a neat spiral. ‘I wouldn’t be talking to you if they weren’t.’
‘That why you attacked my agent – you thought I had them?’
‘You mean that little queer in Santa Monica? Never touched him.’
‘Like you didn’t kill the Brit, right? He crawled into the lake all by himself. You thought he’d lied to you, is that what happened? Or did Burke lose control, kill him while you went to get the negatives?’
‘Some people make the mistake of thinking because I’m big and like to work out I’m stupid. You going to be one of those?’
There are times to talk and times to keep your mouth shut and this was a time for silence but the crack about Lester provoked me. ‘I don’t think you’re stupid at all. If anything, you’re too clever. You beat the location of the negatives out of my husband and tossed his apartment. When you got back to the estate you found Burke confused reality with the movies and committed murder. You dumped the body in the lake with enough cocaine on him to make it look drug related. You told Burke that somebody else got to the apartment first and stole the negatives. When the voice called again – I’m guessing it was another paparazzo named Dave Schuman – you killed him. You knew you couldn’t get away with blackmailing Burke so you struck a set of prints and sent them to Mike Finley with a demand for a quarter million. You’ve let me snoop around this far because as long as I’m still alive Finley will think I’m the one blackmailing him. I wish I was as smart as you. But if I come up with another set of prints you’ll have to deal with me and the price will be much dearer than twenty grand.’
I saw the move before he made it but had forgotten the speed and strength a violent man is capable of. Glasses and silverware flew across the laps of the people sitting next to us and crashed to the floor. I drew the canister of pepper spray from my jacket pocket as I sprang to my feet but Earl came up with the entire table in his paws. Before I could get my hand up he charged forward. The edge caught me at the waist and he rolled forward to flatten me against the wall, the table at my throat. Then he flexed his deltoids and squished me against the brick like a bug.
‘Somebody want to call the police?’ The request came out with my last wheeze of breath.
There must have been a dozen cell phones in the room but nobody moved. I love LA.
‘Nobody’s gonna help you, bitch.’ His jaw moved an inch from my ear, the breath a mix of poison and mint. ‘Not anybody in here and certainly not the police.’ He tossed the table aside like a film prop and walked out, his splay-footed waddle no more hurried than when he came in.
The couple next to me picked stray silverware from their platters of skinless roast chicken. Nobody looked at me directly, as though offended by the bad taste of getting assaulted in public. Restaurants had long been favoured by the city’s lovers as the ideal location in which to break up an affair. Scenes like the one I’d survived happened all the time. They probably thought I’d just told Earl I was sleeping with his personal trainer.
38
When driving Los Angeles at night there seems no end to the lights and asphalt but then the grid of streets crashes against the San Gabriel Mountains rising from the desert like a black tidal wave. Along a sixty mile edge the city goes dark, lights smashing street by street at the massive base of mountains rearing 10,000 feet above sea level. Big Brenda lived where the sprawl broke against the mountains’ flanks. Hers was a nice middle-class neighbourhood of post-war homes on tree-lined streets that curled up and quit at the first serious incline. At two o’clock in the morning the houses were dark shells. The peculiarities of her occupation required Brenda to be a night person. The only lit windows on the block belonged to her.
The man next to Brenda when she opened the door stood a full head shorter than her and half an arm length wider. At first sight he looked fat but when we shook hands – Brenda introduced him as her old man, Raul – I understood he was hard as a bowling ball. He had the heavy kind of eyelids that made him look like he was sleepy all the time and lips that didn’t seem to move at all when he talked. When he took my hand he held it firmly enough that I’d have to gnaw it off at the wrist if he didn’t want to let go. ‘This is Nina? The tough chica you been bragging about? No way! She don’ look so tough, she look like la niña gringa.’
I didn’t know if I was supposed to laugh. I said, ‘Yeah, mucho gusto to you too.’
Brenda took his head in the crook of her arm, gave him a smack on the forehead. ‘Don’t listen to him, he’s got nothing between his ears but el viento. Funny man, make yourself useful and go get us a beer.’
Brenda led me into the living-room and sat me down on a showroom-white colonial-style couch while she took the matching end-chair. The television set – a big Sony mounted into a mahogany veneer wall unit decorated with framed photographs and crystal baubles – played the Home Shopping Network with the sound off. Above the fireplace was an art warehouse reproduction of the face of Christ lit by divine light and on the opposite wall was a blow-up of a wedding picture too old to be anybody present. Nothing anywhere seemed out of its appointed spot nor had it gone more than a day without dusting. I first thought she had constructed the room as a front for her parole officer but that was a condescending notion and I discounted it. Brenda may have been a career criminal but still she didn’t aspire to anything different than to be middle class.
‘So what’s on your mind cariño, you lock your keys in your trunk again?’
She laughed like that was funny and I guess it was but I wasn’t in a laughing mood. ‘I want us to partner up to hit a house.’
Her eyes held me in a grave visual embrace that warned me I had better be serious. ‘I thought you’d be smart enough to stay out of the life. What’s in this house you want to hit?’
‘A video tape, maybe several video tapes.’
She didn’t immediately understand the value of the prize and that annoyed her. After all, you never know which of your friends will turn out to be cranks. The irritation edged her voice when she shouted at Raul to hurry up with the beer. A bottle of Dos XX sailed out of the kitchen. Brenda snared it one handed. Raul was polite enough to deliver mine surface mail. He sat down on the other end of the couch, twisted the cap from his bottle and put it in his front shirt pocket with what looked like five or six others.
‘They have Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?’ He asked, no smile. ‘That’s a good tape. I’d steal that. The Lion King too. Anything by Disney.’
‘The tapes are locked up in a Hollywood Hills estate owned by a movie star. The estate has gates, video surveillance, a bodyguard and an alarm system hooked up to an armed response service. He won’t be expecting a visit so it doesn’t get any harder than just that. The tapes show the murder of my husband.’ I didn’t waste time with the beer; I took half of it down at one go. ‘I can’t promise you any money from this job because there won’t be any. The tapes will go to the cops. But before he died my husband took some photographs of this same actor I should be able to sell to the tabloids. I’ll cut you a piece of that, say fifty per cent. Should be worth fifty grand to you, maybe more, maybe less.’
‘If the job pays no money, the job pays no money,’ Brenda said. ‘You want revenge, we can’t take your money to help.’
‘Sure we can,’ Raul objected. ‘She’s your friend, she’s got no money, I say fine, put her up on the couch, drive her to the welfare office, but no way risk going to jail. No money, no job.’
‘Maybe we don’t even need you.’
Raul got a little excited, shifted to the edge of the couch, pointed the sipping end of his beer at Brenda. ‘You need me. The alarm, remember? What you know about alarms? El electricista soy yo. I do the alarm.’
The conversation shifted into a Spanish too fast and complex for my jailhouse vocabulary but I understood enough to know Raul was talking respect and risk against Brenda’s obligation to friendship. I took advantage long enough to slap down the last
of my beer. ‘I want to pay,’ I said. They didn’t shut up. People rarely do when they get into a good argument. I walked into the kitchen to get myself another beer. When I came back out they stopped arguing to stare at me. Maybe they thought it a rude thing to do, just walk into the kitchen and help myself. ‘The offer is not negotiable. The photographs got my husband killed. Any money, well, it’s blood money. I don’t want it.’
Raul’s sleepy eyes opened a notch. ‘So where’s my cerveza?’
I gave him mine. He opened it and put the bottle cap in his shirt pocket. That was the way he kept track of how much he drank, but I couldn’t tell if it was to limit himself or because he was trying to set some kind of record. He had about a dozen bottle caps in his shirt pocket when Brenda took him off to bed.
Associating with a known felon or felons is technically a parole violation. In a car town like Los Angeles Brenda and I didn’t have to worry about being seen together at our homes or in cafés or even walking the sidewalk. The cops had no presence in those places but they owned the freeways and surface streets. Police in Los Angeles memorized not faces but cars and licence plate numbers. A licence plate is like a name tag strung around your neck for every cop to read as you drive by. Late the next morning Brenda and Raul split from me at the front drive and followed in the Jeep Cherokee.
Forty separate highways and freeways split Los Angeles County like a jigsaw puzzle. From the Sierra Madre foothills we negotiated four of them in traffic ranging from slow to stagnant. The traffic gave me time to work things out. Half of the rant I’d thrown at Earl the night before I believed I could prove but the rest was speculation. He’d beaten Gabe and searched his apartment, that much was certain. The voice on the phone had to be Dave Schuman. Gabe had accused him of trying to scavenge his exclusives. He’d followed us to Vegas and could have tailed Gabe the night he’d photographed the sex party at Burke’s estate. When he realized what Gabe had shot he’d tried to broker a deal. I didn’t know if Gabe had played along and then backed out or been a willing participant up to the moment of his death, but the proof sheet mailed to Burke proved his involvement. The blackmailer didn’t find the proof sheet in a trash bin. Gabe must have given it to him. If a willing participant in the scheme, his greed had killed him as much as the murderer’s knife. The more I learned about why he had been murdered the more my feelings for him changed. In the first few days after his death, I’d ached with loss and the terrible injustice of his murder. The killers had taken my chance at love with his life. Though we had not known each other long or well, I’d felt passion and hope. As I discovered the circumstances of his death, I realized my love for him would have led nowhere.
Killing Paparazzi Page 21